Articles and Resources

QUOTE: The corruption allegations are centered on claims of bribery involving vast real estate projects, many of them in Istanbul, that have become a hallmark of Mr. Erdogan’s time in power. No one has been convicted, but several people, including two sons of government ministers, have been arrested, and one of the departing ministers on Wednesday said that the prime minister himself had been involved in the real estate deals facing scrutiny.

QUOTE: Those of us who visit Mexico know you never get on a bus. It makes you easy pickings for bandits and bad cops, and sometimes you can't tell the difference. Bandits might take your money, and let you go on your way. Bad cops take your liberty, and hold it until someone back home sends enough money to let you go on your way.

QUOTE: The Justice Department filed civil fraud charges late on Monday against the nation's largest credit-ratings agency, Standard & Poor's, accusing the firm of inflating the ratings of mortgage investments and setting them up for a crash when the financial crisis struck....From September 2004 through October 2007, S.&P. "knowingly and with the intent to defraud, devised, participated in, and executed a scheme to defraud investors" in certain mortgage-related securities, according to the suit filed against the agency and its parent company, McGraw-Hill Companies. S.&P. also falsely represented that its ratings "were objective, independent, uninfluenced by any conflicts of interest," the suit said.

QUOTE: a spectacularly dysfunctional national police force. “On a scale of 1 to 10, I would give our police a 2,” said Macharia Njeru, the chairman of Kenya’s new police oversight board, citing corruption allegations, human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, failed inquiries and lost public trust.

QUOTE: Wal-Mart on Thursday reported that its investigation into violations of a federal antibribery law had extended beyond Mexico to China, India and Brazil, some of the retailer’s most important international markets. The disclosure, made in a regulatory filing, suggests Wal-Mart has uncovered evidence into potential violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act...

QUOTE: Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters....The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation. Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

QUOTE: House members are banned from lobbying on Capitol Hill for a year after leaving office (Mr. Pomeroy’s term ended in January), but Mr. Pomeroy, a Democrat, has teamed up with his former chief of staff, who is not subject to the restriction, as a lobbying partner.

QUOTE: The NCAA has what amounts to subpoena power over current athletes and current university employees. That's it. The NCAA's rules don't apply to anyone else. That opens an almost infinite array of cheating opportunities completely undetectable by the NCAA's enforcement cops. If you get caught cheating, you got caught because you're incredibly stupid.

QUOTE: Experts say the fairness fixation reflects dismay at what rapid change has wrought: a widening gap between the rich and the poor, and residual corruption. For President Lee Myung-bak, this is more than a passing problem, because middle-class economic concerns and a string of frauds and scandals have convinced South Koreans that theirs is anything but the “fair society” that he has touted.

QUOTE: For nearly three decades, Warner, 68, has also been a powerful but polarizing figure in regional and international soccer circles. On Monday, he resigned his positions as the vice president of FIFA, soccer’s world governing body, and as the president of soccer’s North American, Central American and Caribbean region, known as Concacaf. He had been accused in a bribery scheme involving as much as $1 million and had been suspended from all soccer activities...

QUOTE: The vast expenses and unsavory alliances surrounding the highway have become a parable of the corruption and mismanagement that turns so many well-intended development efforts in Afghanistan into sinkholes for the money of American taxpayers... There have been 364 attacks on the Gardez-Khost Highway.

QUOTE: What they don't know is that there is another budget of roughly equal heft, traditionally maintained in complete secrecy... It is as though someone sat down and made a list of every individual on earth who actually did not need emergency financial assistance from the United States government, and then handed them the keys to the public treasure.

QUOTE: Charitable funds have gone misspent, jobs have been lost, and the reputation of one of college football’s most prominent organizations has been sullied... The ultimate (and often unfair) question in situations like this is, Where was the board?

QUOTE: The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was established by law to “examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” The hope was that it would be a modern version of the Pecora investigation of the 1930s, which documented Wall Street abuses and helped pave the way for financial reform. Instead, however, the commission has broken down along partisan lines, unable to agree on even the most basic points.

QUOTE: The relationships among Dr. Chu, Dr. Koonin and BP illustrate the complexity of the ties between the company and the government now playing out along the Gulf Coast as they struggle to cope with one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters. Just as the Pentagon and military contractors develop symbiotic business, technical and political interdependencies, the government in this case needs BP’s offshore drilling technology and well-control equipment; the company needs the government’s logistical and scientific expertise, including that of Dr. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

QUOTE: the violence was an omen, beginning a wave of unsolved attacks and official harassment against journalists, human rights activists and opposition politicians around the region, which includes the Moscow suburbs, but not the city itself. Rarely, if ever, is anyone held responsible.

QUOTE: a Defense Department contract worth up to $360 million to transport U.S. military goods through some of the most insecure territory in Afghanistan. But his company has no trucks. Instead, Wardak sits atop a murky pyramid of Afghan subcontractors who provide the vehicles and safeguard their passage. U.S. military officials say they are satisfied with the results, but they concede that they have little knowledge or control over where the money ends up.

QUOTE: the ethics committee declared that lawmakers are free to raise campaign money from the very companies they are benefiting so long as the deciding factors in granting those "earmarks" are "criteria independent" of the contributions. The report served as a blunt rejection of ethics watchdogs and a different group of congressional investigators, who have contended that in some instances the connection between donations and earmarks was so close that it had to be inappropriate.

QUOTE: More than half of America's nuclear plants have received new twenty-year operating licenses. In fact, the NRC has not rejected a single license-renewal application. Many of these plants have also received "power up-rates" that allow them to run at up to 120 percent of their originally intended capacity. That means their systems are subjected to unprecedented amounts of heat, pressure, corrosion, stress and embrittling radiation.

QUOTE: Afghan political analysts observe that Ghazanfar and Zahid Walid are striking examples of the multimillion-dollar business conglomerates, financed by American as well as Afghan tax dollars and connected to powerful political figures, that have... emerged as part of a pervasive culture of corruption here.

QUOTE: former and current State Department officials said Equatorial Guinea’s close ties to the American oil industry were the reason for the lax enforcement of the law [baring official Teodoro Nguema Obiang from entering the U.S,. to his mansion].

QUOTE: A federal grand jury has subpoenaed records from Royal Dutch Shell PLC as part of a Justice Department investigation into corruption allegations against former Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton, according to sources close to the investigation.

QUOTE: Three years after the housing bubble popped, federal prosecutors have yet to bring a case against the executives whose firms took part in some of the worst excesses of the subprime mortgage market.

QUOTE: "This is an important point that people haven't grasped," said Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "We've been using e-mail for years, and it's been insecure all that time.... If you have any hacker who is competent and spends the time and targets you, he's going to get you."

QUOTE: Hawaii prison officials said Tuesday that all of the state’s 168 female inmates at a privately run Kentucky prison will be removed by the end of September because of charges of sexual abuse by guards.

QUOTE: The disclosure that the CIA once hired Blackwater USA for elements of an assassination program has brought back into focus the wide range of intelligence and military activities that are being contracted out to private firms.

QUOTE: authorities ranging from local prosecutors to state regulatory boards to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to the military itself have done relatively little to address the proliferation of dubious auto sales-and-credit tactics [used on military enlistees].

QUOTE: Reforms a decade ago, intended to make the system [procurement system] more efficient and entrepreneurial, had unintended consequences: insufficient oversight, conflicts of interest, unprecedented outsourcing and an endlessly revolving door that leads government officials into the offices of contractors.

QUOTE: The top U.S. aid agency has suspended a $644 million Iraq jobs program after two outside reviews raised concerns about misspending, including an inspector general's audit that found evidence of phantom jobs and money siphoned to insurgents.

QUOTE: A report Anchor published Thursday shows that nearly half of all the advertising clicks coming from Vietnam are composed of fraudulent traffic aimed at inflating online publishers' advertising revenue...

QUOTE: On July 20, the company's [Blackwater] high-powered lawyers from Mayer Brown... filed a motion in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to impose a gag order on Iraqi civilians suing the company.

QUOTE: The research effort at the Pensacola Air Force base fell apart, however, when investigators found evidence that it was used to improperly pay a series of companies linked to [Rep. John P.] Murtha.

QUOTE: House stealing is a fast-growing and easy scam. Once a home is targeted... scammers find out who owns it by searching public records. To prove how easy this scam is, William Sherman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Daily News in New York, bought the Empire State Building with doctored documents.

QUOTE: From 2000 to 2008, only one-fifth of all contracts awarded to Alaska Native corporations were performed in Alaska... last year Alaska Native corporations received 19 percent of all federal contracts awarded to small businesses.

QUOTE: A medical device maker, Synthes Inc., and four of its executives were indicted Tuesday on federal charges that they improperly promoted a bone filler for purposes not approved by the Food and Drug Administration...